There is no practical difference between these two firearms. The top weapon is registered under the National Firearms Act. The bottom is an uncontrolled handgun.
Drunk people should never get behind the wheel of a car. Likewise, angry folks should eschew keyboards. Spock, not Kirk, should forever be your role model. The most successful people control their emotions. However, I am going to willingly violate that axiom today. As I settle in behind my trusty MAC, I am absolutely livid.
This is the reason short-barreled weapons need to be removed from the purview of the NFA. The Pistol Stabilizing Brace is on top alongside a conventional M4 buttstock.
Quiet Power
The Senate Parliamentarian is an unelected woman named Elizabeth MacDonough. Ms. MacDonough is 59 years old and a breast cancer survivor. She earned her JD degree from Vermont Law School in 1998. She took her current job in 2012. She was appointed by Nevada Democrat Harry Reid.
The Parliamentarian’s job is to interpret the Standing Rules of the United States Senate. What makes her so important is that the parliamentarian has sole discretion concerning what can and cannot be done under the Senate’s budget reconciliation process. The details of this process stem from something called the Byrd Rule. Subjecting budget legislation to this scrutiny is colloquially referred to as the Byrd Bath.
All the chaos stems from the fact that Left and Right cannot agree on anything at all these days. In the past, everybody acknowledged that Mom, apple pie, and America were awesome.
The philosophical differences between the two political poles were nuanced at best. Nowadays, however, thanks to such hot-button topics as abortion, gun control, trans surgeries for children, and the like, the two sides might as well come from two different planets. That’s fine, except that nothing gets through the US Senate without a 60-vote majority.
That used to be two-thirds. The Founding Fathers, bless their hearts, knew that human beings were rambunctious, emotional, and chaotic. That’s the US House of Representatives in a sentence. Stuff passes the House via a simple majority.
The requirement for a two-thirds majority in the Senate was a safety valve of sorts to ensure that the tyranny of the majority did not unfairly target the little guy. However, the unintended consequence nowadays is that nothing ever gets done. You couldn’t get sixty senators to agree that the sky was blue or that puppies were cute.
The one gleaming exception is the budget reconciliation process. Knowing that nothing as partisan as the budget would ever pass the 60-vote threshold, budget bills move out of the Senate via simple majority.
However, not before Ms. Elizabeth MacDonough gives her seal of approval. Ms. MacDonough, with the stroke of a keyboard, can edit out anything she feels does not comport with the budget process. This is designed to keep our idiot lawmakers from levying a transfer tax on spitballs or replacing the Bald Eagle with the Archaeopteryx as the national bird, all by falsely claiming it was budget-related.
Possession of the bottom semiautomatic rifle is uncontrolled in most places in the US. If unregistered, the top gun will get you ten years in federal prison. That seems pretty stupid to me.
The rifle on top has a 14.5-inch barrel and therefore currently demands registration with the government and a $200 tribute. Everything else is cash and carry.
Erasure Legislation?
Now fast forward to the Year of Our Lord 2025, and Donald J. Trump, the most disruptive person in all of human history, takes his mail at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Miraculously, language got inserted into the 2025 Budget Reconciliation Act (the Big Beautiful Bill) that rights a grievous historical wrong, removing both sound suppressors and short-barreled weapons from the purview of the NFA. This was going to be American history’s first meaningful pushback against the inexorable juggernaut that has been a century’s worth of gun control. And Elizabeth MacDonough just scribbled it all out.
So, there we are. Forget that the entire issue orbits around a tax statute. That’s the only way they got it passed back in 1934. For the first time in my lifetime, both houses of Congress would have agreed to grant Americans a little bit more firearms freedom. Now that’s gone. Senator Thune and Vice President Vance have the option of either firing or overruling Ms. McDonough, but they won’t. They have bigger fish to fry. American gun owners don’t matter. We never have.
The gun on top has to be registered with the government. The shorter version on bottom does not. It never did make any sense.
Lasting Impacts
This seems a niche issue. However, Randy Weaver’s wife Vicki, his 14-year-old son Sammy, and a Federal Marshal named William Degan all died because Weaver cut the barrel on a shotgun down to 13 inches. Google Ruby Ridge siege if you’d like the details. This is a big deal.
You can walk out of an American gun shop with a handgun that will fit in your jeans pocket. However, cut the barrel on your favorite AR15 back to less than sixteen inches, and that’s a felony good for a $10,000 fine and ten years in the Big House. It’s simply asinine, and we came within one keystroke of finally making that right.
We American gun owners have lost every legislative fight we have ever waged. Every single one. The 1986 Firearms Owners Protection Act sounded great, but that was when Uncle Sam banned machineguns.
If the bill does pass in its current form, it does remove the onerous $200 transfer tax. That is no small thing, and I am sincerely grateful for the legislators who squirreled that bit of prose into the beast.
While all of the superfluous registration requirements still remain, abolishing the transfer tax will open up a fresh new market in used cans and short-barreled guns. It should also supercharge the suppressor industry as a whole. However, it should have been so much better.
I once wore the uniform and was both willing and available to die for this great nation if that was what it took. I love my country.
However, I am profoundly disappointed with my government. What was originally supposed to be of the people, by the people, and for the people simply isn’t any more. Who knows, perhaps in another fifty years we’ll have another shot at it. I will, of course, be dead by then, but at least somebody else will be the Parliamentarian.